Tag Archives: SES London 2012 Social

I’d never heard of Sundeep Kapur before this talk and wasn’t really sure what to expect. Social media is one of those things that every man and his dog consider themselves to be “experts” on. However, I was instantly enthralled when this softly spoken gentleman started talking about how social media is like feeding his birds at home. Where was he going with this?

Spreading the Seed

He started off his talk by telling us how he bought a bird table to put in his garden at home. He installed it and 15 minutes later, rang up the company where he had bought it from to ask why there were no birds in his garden. They told him that he should find out what kind of birds live in the area and find out what they eat. Then to sprinkle the food around the garden and near the bird table. Over a period of time he attracted all kinds of birds to his garden but he reminds us that we have to keep feeding them what they want or they won’t come back.

Breaking Things Down – Segmenting

Just like the different birds in his garden respond to different types of food, Sundeep tells us that different customers will respond to different content. We need to identify who our customers are and monitor what they are responding to. Once you know this you can create a content strategy that keeps everybody happy and keeps your birds…sorry I mean customers coming back for more.

Asking Your Readers What They Want

It’s all very well trying to work out what your customers like to read about but that takes time. Sundeep gave examples of where he simply sent out tweets and emails asking what his readers would like to learn more about. Sometimes he would give them a few suggestions and they would vote on which one they wanted to hear more about. Once again it comes down to user generated content that keeps things ultra relevant.

Some other little nuggets of gold from Sundeep….

- Help your blog or email stand out by branding it. Try spicing up “The Oxford Blog” with “The Definitive Oxford School of English Blog” to make it more specific.

Don’t use one generic tweet to promote a blog article. Extract the main bits of information and create lots of different tweets that will entice different types of people. This also means you can push the same content for longer periods of time.

- Train and encourage all staff to get involved in social campaigns. Why can’t the customer service team also have access to the twitter account? They are the ones who can answer the questions quickest.

What Else?

All in all I think Sundeep understands that social media shouldn’t purely be used as a marketing tool. He reminds us that the whole point of it is to be social and reach out to our customers/fans/users etc. We can measure it’s success not only by how much money it makes us, but also in terms of how successful we are at communicating with our market. Ultimately it’s about being better and offering more for the user. Surely that’s the key to success?